1. Field of Invention
A dispensing device for beverage cup lid which prevents excessive human contact with the lid prior to insertion upon the beverage cup, the device providing a central stationary lid retaining rod suspended from a lid cabinet upon which a stacked plurality of lids are retained through a central bore, the lids urged downward by a traveling press plate engaging a rotating threaded shaft, the threaded shaft moving the press plate against the uppermost lid on the retaining rod pressing the stacked plurality of lids down along the retaining rod in increments programmed to release only the lowermost lid from the end of the retaining rod onto the top of a beverage cup positioned below the retaining rod. The device is operated by the activation of a presence sensor, either a beverage cup or a clean hand, which causes the incremental dispensing of a single lid.
2. Description of Prior Art
The following United States patents were discovered and are disclosed within this application for utility patent. All relate to devices which provide for the dispensation of a drink cup lid, either manually or by operation of a mechanical means. A recent U.S. Pat. No. 7,337,919 to Walsh, a manually operated beverage lid dispenser indicates a contained stack of lids within a cylinder which are horizontally separated from a stack by gravity, one at a time, and horizontally moved by a slide plate which contains the single separated lid and draws it out from beneath the stack for presentation in an inverted position. One must use their hand to remove the lid and right it for application to a beverage cup. Similar devices are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,474,503 to Davis for drink lids and U.S. Pat. No. 5,975,839 to Ashby for disks, primarily stacked recording media.
A spring is used to push cups and lids upward in a cylindrical stack in U.S. Pat. No. 4,858,783 to Mayfield, III. A similar spring type device is used for the horizontal thrust and presentation of beverage lids in both U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,012,952 to Franz and 7,207,462 to Gunderson. A mechanical device segregates a single lid from a stack and slides the lid through a slot in the device framework by the rotation of a plurality of gears which separate, grasp and move the lid from its stacked position to the slot by some manually activated means in U.S. Pat. No. 6,659,305 to Thompson. Two simple stacked cylindrical lid dispensing devices are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,643,334 to Steele and 2,215,850 to Holdeman.
None of the above devices places a stacked group of lids on a central stationary retaining rod, they do not involve a rotational drive shaft which applied force to the top of the stacked lids to force the stack downward in a programmed incremental distance to release a single lid, and they do not provide an option for the dispensing of a lid without human contact with the lid prior to being applied to the cup. They also do not disclosed the components similar to the present device to load and unload the lids nor the sensors applied to activate the motion of the device.